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Rob Zacny

Episode 210: A Silly Place

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This game came almost one year to the day after the unabashed horror that was Mass Effect 3.  These games are the most telling explaination of the dangers of mixing monopolies and shareholders. 

 

SimCity 5 is the wrapping paper you keep after throwing the gift away.  It's pretentious in the worst way (i.e. it's called SimCity, not SimCity 5) and also heavily dependent on sizzle and lies -- straight up lies, mind you.  The whole thing where a guy hacked the game to prove that you could run it on your computer without the server isn't shocking; it's sad.

 

EA Games is the perfect microcosm of the dark side of capitalism -- where maximizing shareholder equity comes at the cost of everything including customer service.  But at the end of the day, this is our fault: EA ends it's fiscal year in March every year and they got us again.

 

Whatever it is, we must not buy anything that EA puts out next March.  I don't care if it's the first AAA porn game.  I don't care if it's Battlefront of Honor: Warmonger IV, an RPS with lasers.  Plants vs. Zombies: MiracleGrow, Bejezzled 11, or Need for Speed: Shotgun in the Shotgun -- don't... get... tricked... again!

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I listened to the first 23 minutes of this podcast and was disappointed that the speakers were so ill-informed about some aspects of the game.

 

Just one big for instance: One speaker banged on about the impermanence of the game. He used as a prime example the water pumping station. He complained it quickly depletes the water table in its neighborhood. Thus forcing him to bulldoze the building and build a new one elsewhere.

 

He seemed completely unaware of the fact that if you put your water station next to the sewage treatment plant you will have a renewable water source and never have to move the pumping station.

 

I don't think the speakers have enough experience yet with the game to be commenting on it.

 

If instead the host had included one of the game's designers who could have addressed his guests concern, that would have been a far more informative program.

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He seemed completely unaware of the fact that if you put your water station next to the sewage treatment plant you will have a renewable water source and never have to move the pumping station.

 

I don't think the speakers have enough experience yet with the game to be commenting on it.

 

Doesn't that just speak to how badly documented the game is? So much of the game is completely unexplained. I like the rules in a strategy game to be transparent. 

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While listening to this episode I can't help but think how much I'd really like to hear a postmortem on the Sword of the Stars 2 debacle.

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I listened to the first 23 minutes of this podcast and was disappointed that the speakers were so ill-informed about some aspects of the game.

 

Just one big for instance: One speaker banged on about the impermanence of the game. He used as a prime example the water pumping station. He complained it quickly depletes the water table in its neighborhood. Thus forcing him to bulldoze the building and build a new one elsewhere.

 

He seemed completely unaware of the fact that if you put your water station next to the sewage treatment plant you will have a renewable water source and never have to move the pumping station.

 

I don't think the speakers have enough experience yet with the game to be commenting on it.

 

If instead the host had included one of the game's designers who could have addressed his guests concern, that would have been a far more informative program.

I agree it would have been nice to have a designer of the game on, but learning about that water rule is quite surprising to me. It seems extremely silly that it's actually apparently strictly more desirable to build your water facilities essentially on top of a sewage dump rather than in an area that the game's data visualization is clearly showing as an abundant source of clean water. What a weird design choice.

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Maxis has also acknowledged a bug -- water towers and pumps near rivers or the ocean should be essentially infinite but are not.

 

The sewage treatment plant should be populating the water table with water and should be visible on the map (not the outflow pipe).   Though you still want to use filtered water pumps instead of basic.

 

I think the best we can hope for with the fundamental simulation is mod support.  I'd love to see what the community could do with an agent based system like this.   

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While listening to this episode I can't help but think how much I'd really like to hear a postmortem on the Sword of the Stars 2 debacle.

 

Seconded.  For that matter, there are so many current and past space 4X games out there that there's multiple episodes of topics waiting to be mined.

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I'm definitely looking forward to the HotS episode. I think how it turns out will be dependent on who appears on the show, so that should make it interesting. I just listened to a Qt3 podcast where Tom Chick was ragging on it...

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Also Rob, you didn't link to whatever it was that you said you would link to!

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I've finished listening to the episode now; it's kind of funny that release lag means the recording predated the resignation of Riccitello, given Rob's worries about the investor call of doom.  I don't think that's an unfounded fear.  I think there's justifyable worry that we'll see EA focus on freemium and established franchises, which is another way of saying "stripmining our user base for the benefit of the next fiscal quarter".  Or "gee, this seed corn is really tasty, and it's right here, we don't have to do any of that sowing and harvesting crap to get it..."

 

I haven't played recent Sim City games myself; I burned out on them back around whichever version got the General MIDI Patchset "smooth jazz" soundtrack.  I've played various of the other games mentioned today, though, and I've quite enjoyed Tropico 4.  I have to agree, though, in Tropico I always wind up playing as the benevolent despot; I find myself being naturally nice if there isn't a compelling gameplay reason not to be, and if there were I'm not sure I'd be inclined to keep playing.

 

It was a good episode.

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Quebec is a board game which is thematically about the gradual evolution of a city. I haven't played it and suspect in practice it is just an area control, worker placement game. That said it does seem like a fertile medium with which to represent the evolution of a city. Permanence is a more manageable idea in a one to two hour game. Maybe a phase based system whereby players cycle responsibilities, meaning they inherit other idiots' poor planning. It would also alleviate Chris's asset generation concern.

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To Rowan's question of why the Caesar games' AI agents feel more capable than than those in SimCity: the answer seems to me to be transparency. The Caesar games operate on a more board gamey logic that becomes clear to we, the player. Just like Chris mentioned with Anno, we can plan ahead and make meaningful decisions versus the fuzzy decisions of SimCity.

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I'm a long time listener (pre idlethumbs/Zacny times). I found the episode interesting, so I finally joined the forums.

 

I wanted to post some board games about city building from the past year that some people might find interesting, especially because of the varied ways each takes the SimCity concept and transforms it into cardboard. I'll add links to their BGG pages once the site is back up from maintenance. For now I'll post a link to Tom Vasel's reviews of each so anyone interested can see the components and get a decent rules explanation.


Sunrise City is a tile laying game in which each player has different roles they draft which give them special abilities. Each round the players pick a role, zone the city, then build new buildings in zones they control or build upper levels on previous buildings. It focuses mostly on the zoning aspect of city building, and comes off more as an abstract. It's a fun game though, and really good for families once everyone understands how the different roles work. The weirdest part is the game gives you double VP's for hitting the ten mark on the score track, which is a unique mechanic. 

 

Suburbia is a game in which everyone is building sections of the same city. There is player board they add buildings/city sections to that can be purchased from a central board. There are basic government, residential, and industrial buildings, and then there is a row of increasingly expensive, randomly drawn buildings that have different powers. Here the game is more focused on the interaction of powers from different buildings, and the management of income versus population growth. You have an income level and population growth level: the former gives you money each turn that you can spend on new buildings, the latter increases your points. There are hurdles that represent your city's infrastructure needing to improve that lowers your population growth and income.This is considered one of the best board games of the past year. 

 

Gingkgopolis is a sort of weird fusion of multiple mechanics that results in a sort of city building game. It's a future where people are building some weird tree city thing... don't worry about the theme. The players use a combination of drafting, deckbuilding, tableau building, and area control to build a tile city on the board. It is sufficiently complicated and unique that describing it would only confuse all of us, so I suggest watching the linked video for a better explanation. 

 

I think what we see from these three games is that people want to play a city building game with other people. What we also see is that none of these are anything at all like SimCity. Part of it is the personal nature of people's SimCity cities. They become a reflection of what we find interesting and our values. This is the idea SimCity Societies played with, throwing much of the simulation out to instead give the cities character traits. Another reason there is a difference here is that these games mostly involves building on or around other player's stuff, or limiting the other player's options. SimCity is more of a sandbox than a competitive arena.

 

Sorry this post is so long, but these are the things I was thinking of when I've read about the ways the new SimCity has added multiplayer.

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Great list Sinsofa, I've been meaning to get Suburbia. What many tile laying games don't have is a clear sense of history or time. Carcassonne is obviously a much simpler model but what I love about it (especially with the first two expansions) is the feeling of living with your own and other people's decisions. Accumulating ambitions and intentions, delicious.

How familiar are people with SimCity 4? I played a city a few weeks ago and it very successfully accomplishes the ambitions of 5 with abstraction and suggestion. Take the simulated individuals of 5. In 4 you can simply move Sims into specific buildings. They will live a life representative of the area. It achieves everything it is intended to, giving a granular picture of what a specific area needs and helping to create a sense of a living city. It is a very simple and economical solution.

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